Hoeg Law has offered a video explaining a new bill in
Congress, HR 5573, “Protect Kids” or “Protect real online threats endangering
children today”, introduced by Tim Walberg (R-MI) or Bob Rush (D-IL).
Engadget has a preliminary summary of the bill by Igor
Bonifacic, here.
Several points come into play. One is that the COPPA
age increases from 13 to 16, which would obviously make it much harder to protect
certain content (especially related to games) as “not made for kids”. I think that were this to happen, Hoeg’s idea
of invisible age-gates would become absolutely necessary, and I think (as I
have said before) they could be built into routers (so families can have
different levels of access with different accounts).
The Engadget article argues that they would apply to mobile
apps, but really they already did, as Hoeg explains.
More significant, as Hoeg explains toward the end of
his video, is the “catch 22” or feedback circularity in the law, that would
require websites or apps that are predicated on collecting kids’ information to
remove that info if requested to do so by parents later, without denying the kids’
ability to at least access the website or app.
He gave certain Pokemon Go apps (which I have seen teenagers play
outside, like near the Angelika theater in Fairfax Va) as an application that
could no longer exist.
Hoeg reports that there was a Tech Freedom conference
today in the Capitol visitors’ center today (Washington DC) on COPPA, which may not have
covered this new legislation, link. I’ll
check to see if there is a video of it later. I may not have as much time as I
used to for going to these events because of changes I have had to announce in
my own priorities recently (as here on Jan. 9).
No comments:
Post a Comment